Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (review)

The repertoire of the damages humans are capable of inflicting upon each other is huge, varied, and ever expanding, from the horrors of genocide to the petty insults of a vengeful book reviewer, from slavery to importuning a junior colleague to pick up your dry cleaning, from war between nations to lies between friends. We are accomplished smashers and destroyers of the bodies and souls of others and of carefully wrought relationships between individuals and among communities. Though Margaret Walker does not treat the moral dimension of our lives as something that can be tidily filleted and lifted out of the social fabric into which it is so closely woven, she nonetheless thinks that moral damage is specifiable enough to enable us to see why and when moral repair is urgent and what such repair requires.

Here, as in her earlier Moral Understandings, Walker treats morality “as a phenomenon of human life in real time and space consist[ing] in trust-based relations anchored on our expectations of one another that require us to take responsibility for what we do or fail to do, and that allow us to call others to account for what they do or fail to do” (1998, 23). On her view, which we might call that of a moral anthropologist as much as a moral psychologist, morality is the study of us as beings capable of entering into, sustaining, damaging, and repairing such relations.

Relations of this sort depend on confidence in the standards governing our expectations, and on trust in ourselves and those with whom we share the standards to live by them and be prepared to answer to failures to do so. Given that confidence in the rightness of the standards and trust in ourselves and others to remain faithful to them can be undermined, it turns out that “living in moral relationship requires a residual and renewable hopefulness that we and others are worthy of the trust we place in each other, and that our world allows us to pursue the goods to which our shared understandings are meant to lead us” (24). In this sense, as Walker puts it in one of many charming and illuminating metaphors throughout the text, hopefulness “is not the icing on the cake, but is the pan in which the cake is baked” (210).

If being in moral relations involves being in a web of normative expectations sustained by confidence, trust, and hope, then to undertake the repair of moral relations is to try to restore “confidence in shared moral standards, trust in our responsiveness to them and responsibility under them, and hope that our confidence and trust are not misplaced” (191–92). Such repair jobs typically are delicate and difficult, and can’t be done well if repairers—that’s more or less all of us, more or less always on call—do not understand the structure and function of that which is to be repaired: those who undertake moral repair must understand “the conditions of moral relationship that are a reference point for assessing whether an intended repair of moral relationship achieves its aim” (10). Hence the outline of the book: a chapter each on hope and trust, exploring the social and psychological conditions of their creation, maintenance, and loss; then a chapter given over to resentment, in its capacity to send off alarms about ruptures to the normative standards and the trust and hope on which they depend; and finally, chapters on forgiving and other ways of making amends as potential tools for the repair of such ruptures.

Hope, Walker insists, is different from wishful thinking, in which one can breezily indulge even when, perhaps especially when, one acknowledges the utter impossibility of that wished for. To cease to have hope in the context of moral relations is to cease to believe in the possibility that the norms by which one has been guided are the right ones to live by, that others can and should be trusted to live...